Word: tracklessly
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...world explorer, a man equally at home in the forests of New Zealand and the trackless Arctic tundra, tried to find his way in a rented car from Logan International Airport to the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. Forced into a high-speed exit decision at a rotary, he soon realized that he had made a wrong choice. He was immediately and irretrievably lost because there were nothing but cross-street signs, so he could not find where he was on the map clenched in his fist. Cursing the lack of street signs, he asked a cabbie for directions...
...word of the episode first came out of Montana ten months ago, it seemed a bizarre yarn that belonged in the pages of some old Wild West pulps. Two unshaven, rifle-toting renegade mountain men, a father and son, abduct a young woman to take with them into the trackless Spanish Peaks wilderness where they live. Overtaken by searchers, they kill one pursuer, accidentally wound their captive of 18 hours (she has now recovered completely), then flee alone to the high country, only to be tracked down five months later by an unrelenting sheriff...
...problem is simply to find the right ones. This takes three or four drafts usually, the first stiff and awkward, "like some English-class essay," and the last chatty and, in a carefully chiseled way, spontaneous. Advice to imitators: to avoid marooning yourself without provisions in a trackless last paragraph, think ahead of time of your cheery ending, the gag that leaves the reader newly hopeful that joining the French Foreign Legion may not be the only answer. Bombeck is proud of never missing a deadline, and she makes a point of quoting the praise of an elderly Detroit Free
When Barbra Streisand talks, she gets lost in the trackless deserts of her burgeoning vocabulary. "Creativity is like a part of perversion," she will begin, "like a thing that goes inward for emotion, not responsively, because intellect is bad for what I do." Such thoughts always bring her to a helpless "Know what I mean?" And no one ever does. But when she sings, everyone knows exactly what she means; even with a banal song, she can hush a room as if she really had something worth saying...
There was no massive attack by regular units across a well-defined boundary in Indochina, but the seeping-in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. These forces were supplied from neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; North Vietnamese sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By a weird inversion of logic, whenever we reacted by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos...